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Friday, September 06, 2013

Encounters

It was almost a week before I offered
Charlie the money we'd made from playing a trick on Edward Hillary –
he was the kind of man who worked at a Wall Street casino and can be
spared most pity or sorrow – but she just laughed it off when I
suggested a college fund. I want to tell her that we cannot travel
forever, that there are places I will go that she cannot follow. I
know she knows this, but also that she does not know
this. We settle on silence and a couple days of living in high-end
hotels. Because Charlie insists that we use the money Edward's
daughter gave us to sleep in nice places. Nice seems to mean places
where you pay a lot of money in order to avoid seeing poor people.

Hotels
need little magic that they do not themselves provide, so the rest
was nice until tonight. I wake at the tail end of the witching
hour to pain in my tail bone that only walking cures. I dress,
leaving Charlie to sleep in the other bed, depart the hotel room. The
concierge in the lobby asks if I need anything, as if guests
wandering outside at 3:33 am in jeans and a t-shirt is entirely
normal.

I just smile and walk outside. It is
raining lightly but I decide not to let the rain touch me, following
the throbs of pain and aches in my toes as the magic leads me a good
dozen city blocks. No one bothers me at all during the walk, human or
otherwise; I decide not to think on what that means.

I follow flickering neon, odd scraps of
paper and a magician's intuition for half an hour; the attack comes
in a third side-alley, a blur of movement from the shadows to my left
that slows to a crawl as it hits the ward I've wrapped about myself,
magic as solid as a policeman's baton. I spin and rap the creature
sharp on the forehead: a magician's touch isn't like that of other
people. It doesn't notice and lunges again, all pale, red-eyed and
dishevelled, teeth bright and sharp, canines more prominent and
sharper. It is male, appearing to be roughly ten years old and in a
state of raw anger and furious hungers.

You mind?
I whisper to the wind; it wraps about the Other a moment later and
slaps him into the wall twice with perhaps more force than is needed.

Some of the hunger
fades as the creature strains against the wind once, twice, and then
gives up, panting for air. "Magic," he hisses.

"Magician,
yes." I reach out a hand, raising his chin, the last hour of his
life spilling into my mind in a rush of images. "You tried to
bite someone and got maced."

He raises his chin
further and glares at me. "I am new here," he says, each
word precise and measured, under it the truth that the biting had
failed, that the creature could not drain others. Vampire's aren't
strong as far as Others go – in fact, few things are weaker beyond
Greys by some estimations – but I've never ran into one that
couldn't drain energy at all. Not that it is a vampire, or
greys are aliens, but the terms have fallen into common use and work
as broad shorthand.

"You should
take on a different form, or at least an older one? The vampire is –
limited," I offer, trying to be diplomatic.

A hint of colour
creeps up into the boy's face. "I can't."

I blink, press my
hand in lightly through flesh and pull back a moment later as he
whimpers in pain. He is young as the Outside would measure it. Small
and weak there, and the same here as well. I pull the mace out of his
system and he gulps relieved breaths, not even strong enough to
manage that alone. "How did you get here?"

I put no power into
the question and he is too relieved to notice my tone. "A – a
thudent exthange?" he says, and then freezes, cheeks burning.

I pause, then
decide asking about that would just mean sleepless nights. "And
I am?"

"A magithan,"
he mumbles around his fangs.

I ask the wind to
let him go; he lands lightly, staring up warily. "I could send
you home."

He freezes and
shakes his head minutely.

"Why not?"
I could find out, but I'm not sure he would survive the experience.

"I'm – not
as weak here," he says, meeting my gaze, resisting the urge to
rub his chest where my fingers brushed his Self.

"Perhaps. You
could be something old hiding in a weak shell."

"You think
I'd uthe thith one?" he says indignantly.

"Others have."

He blinks a few
times and his teeth slowly become merely human with an effort that
turns his face the colour of bone and leaves him whimpering in pain.
"Jath," he begins then: "My name is Jathal," and
the falls silent, mouth snapping shut.

I hold out my right
hand. "Think it?"

He presses his hand
into mine and does so, his name weaving between us. It is smaller
than I thought and he offers up all of it desperately, under it a
binding open and wide.

"What are you
doing?"

He lets go with a
gulp."You could kill me anyway?"

"You wish to
be bound." I draw myself up; he doesn't cower. "Do you
swear service by the Cone and the Grave?" Old names for older
powers.

He just stares at
me blankly. "I don't know what that is."

I must look as
blank as I stare down at him. I've never ran into anything from
Outside that didn't know about the powers that govern the Ways. "How
old are you?"

He stiffens at the
gentleness in my voice and then looks away. "I don't know. I
wath running from a threat, from thome ...." his face twists up
"from a force bigger than me," he continues, slower. "It
wanted to eat me. I ran and found a – a hole? A door? I fell to
this world."

An Other trapped in
a form the world chose, unable to break it. It wasn't unheard of:
I've been told that the myth of bigfoot comes from such things. I let
out a breath. "I'm not going to bind you as my servant," I
say after wrapping other bindings into him; he doesn't even notice me
doing it.

The boy freezes,
scant control gone as fangs protrude to puncture his lower lip. His
yelp of pain distracting him for a moment as he struggles to hold a
human seeming.

It takes everything
I have not to laugh. "I'm going to trust you. We're staying in a
motel: you know what that is?"

He nods; transit
imparts language even if his ability to speak it seems to have been
twisted up, an echo of forcing himself into the world without the
means or power to manage it.

"Jay."

"Huh?"

"Does that
work as a use-name?"

He
says it slowly a few times, then offers up a most serious nod and
falls into step beside me. I try not to think about what Charlie is
going to make of this.

2 comments:

"I follow flickering neon, odd scraps of paper and a magician's intuition for half an hour..."

"...in a state of raw anger and furious hungers"

And I especially love that the magician, who seems to live by his own abnormal sense of *normal*, thought of something like a college fund, which seems so near-paralyzingly-middle-American-white picket fence/2.5 kids-normal as to be absurd (for him).

Hah, glad someone got that :) It was meant to be a desperate grasp at 'well, she has to do something and I have money now ... wait, college costs money!' and latching onto stuff told to him when he was younger as being somehow valid.

Which Charlie rightly laughs off, for reasons both practical and personal .

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”